![]() Towards the end, they meet in LA for Mapplethorpe to take a photograph of Smith, now pregnant by her husband, for the cover of her album. The last pages of the book had me in tears. Deaths abound, but none is sadder than Robert Mapplethorpe’s, which opens and closes the book. Smith reflects, when she first enters the coveted back room at Max’s Kansas City and looks around ‘at everyone bathed in the blood light’, that ‘few would survive the cruel plagues of a generation’. The saddest strand that is woven through – Patti’s black ribbon against her white shirt – is death. Perhaps it borders on name-dropping tedium, but Smith writes with such sincerity that you can’t help but feel she’s just trying to render an accurate picture of what her life was like and these happen to be the people who populated her cityscape. The pages are rich with priceless exchanges and encounters like this – with Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Salvador Dali (who told her she was like ‘a crow, a gothic crow’) to name just a few. “Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?” He leaned forward and looked at me intently. They sat down together and fell into conversation until: He bought her the sandwich and stood her a coffee too. ![]() Luckily Allen Ginsberg happened to be there to help her out. She writes of her distress when, having saved the fifty-five cents for her favourite sandwich at a local café, she found it had gone up in price by ten cents so she could no longer afford it. They both endure acute poverty and illness – Patti resorts to supplementing their lettuce soup and stale doughnuts with stolen steaks from a butcher. Before the Chelsea, there is a grim stay at the Hotel Allerton, full of ‘collective misery and lost hopes, forlorn souls who had fouled their lives’, when Robert suffers the pain of gonorrhoea. What saves Just Kids from suffocating through schmaltziness is the harsh reality woven through. This spirit of fairy-tale romance pervades the book, which is suffused with a dreamlike atmosphere, as though Smith and Mapplethorpe were living an eerie, blessed existence. It’s an impossibly romantic account of their first night together – a wordless, spiritual communion, a shining knight in armour, staying awake all night together and then falling asleep in each other’s arms. Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood. When we awoke he greeted me with his crooked smile, and I knew he was my knight.Īs if it was the most natural thing in the world we stayed together, not leaving each other’s side save to go to work. Wordlessly we absorbed the thoughts of one another and just as dawn broke fell asleep in each other’s arms. Just Kids is Smith’s poetic, mythic telling of their story. Among those bright young stars struggling to shine were Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Artists, playwrights, poets and rock stars all knocking together, all skint, all committed to creating great work. New York in the seventies must have been an amazing place.
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